


treat me like a stranger

by rappaccini



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Bed Trick, Canon-Compliant: Post Season 1, Complicated Relationships, F/M, False Identity, Five in his adult body, Happy Ending, Implied Child Abuse, Manipulation, Pining, Pseudo-Incest, Sexual Content, Smut That Ends In Angst, think of this as a really fucked-up rom-com, withholding information
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-16
Updated: 2020-07-20
Packaged: 2021-03-05 00:48:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 16,706
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25385557
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rappaccini/pseuds/rappaccini
Summary: He knows what he has to do, and feels his gut turn in horrific guilt.But it’s the ideal solution, isn’t it? Five has to keep her in his sight, has to keep a close eye on her to keep her off the path that’ll lead to the apocalypse, and he must do so without arousing the Commission’s attention.The answer is laying in front of him, dead as can be.Five stares down at Leonard, and steels himself to the grim task ahead of him: He must steal Leonard Peabody's identity, and seduce Vanya.(Or, Five loses track of his siblings, lands in his adult body, in the past one week earlier, and... chooses a different route of stopping the apocalypse.)
Relationships: Number Five | The Boy/Vanya Hargreeves, Vanya Hargreeves/Leonard Peabody (technically)
Comments: 89
Kudos: 415





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Based on this kinkmeme prompt: 
> 
> https://umbrellakink.dreamwidth.org/284.html?thread=249372&posted=1#cmt1215004

They’ve slipped out of the world with only a millisecond to spare, hand in hand in hand in hand in hand, holding tight enough to grind the bones of their fingers together, watching the bright orange flash of the death of the world sputter away beneath them.

Five has a clear date in mind, but it simmers and dissolves before him, lost under the strain of carrying the seven of them, and he finds himself unsteady, unfocused, clinging to the desire to fix it, to fix her, but unable to see the path to doing so through the blinding brilliance.

Everything is lost in a blur of light and color, as the world fades beneath them, and they are unmoored, hurtling through the wild bright space between times that Five only glimpses when he jumps.

Now, they are hovering there, in a space so bright he cannot make out a single one of his siblings’ faces, only the dark, grayish shadows they leave behind, and they are being tugged this way and that, as though their bones are made of rubber.

They unravel, and he suddenly feels their circle come undone, feels Diego and Allison’s sweat-slick hands slide out of his own, sees six flashing faces in a kaleidoscope of time and space, warping, crying out to him, reaching, reaching, reaching…

And he lands. Hard.

Five has fallen through a hole in the universe, back down another rabbit hole, and he has landed alone, his head clanging hard against something metallic, sending a burst of color into the back of his brain.

He wakes, sometime later, staring up at a heavy gray sky, lightly spitting rain down onto his face.

He wakes to a head stuffed with cotton, like he’s gone and dropped himself back into Egypt, and awoken on an embalming table, halfway through the process.

He wakes to his skin, shivering irritably, like it wants to peel off of him and go crawling away across the ground.

He wakes to a pulsing, bone-deep exhaustion, the urge to roll his eyes back and collapse into a deep, deep sleep.

He wakes, to the familiar scratch of his old suit, rubbing irritably up against him, fitting perfectly.

Wait.

Fitting.  _ Perfectly. _

Five jerks up, as if caught by a bolt of lightning from the gathering storm above, and draws in a sharp, ragged gasp at the sight of himself.

At his arms, and legs, still long and lean but no longer gangly. At his hands, large and strong. At his feet, no longer slightly oversized, the indication of a height that he’d have to grow into. At the way his legs stretch across the length of the Dumpster he’s landed in, to rest the soles of his feet against the metal lip of the container, at the way it indicates that he is much, much taller.

Five reaches up to his face, feeling the curve of the jaw, the absence of all baby fat, the shape of the nose, the wear around the eyes.

His jaw drops.

He’s back. He’s back, in his adult body, in his twenty-nine-year-old body, in the one he should have had all along. He’s done it, he’s…

Alone.

He’s alone.

Five raises his arms, glancing around for Diego and Allison, half-buried in the trash beside him, for Luther cradling Vanya on the alley floor, for Klaus hanging from the fire escape.

There’s no one. 

Something catches in Five’s throat.

He’s  _ alone. _

He fucked up. He  _ fucked up. _ He lost hold of them, sent them scattered into time, fallen into the alley he now recognizes to be the one behind their mansion, landed alone in the past. Now, wherever they are,  _ whenever  _ they are, assuming they still  _ are, _ and haven’t been torn to ribbons in the time-stream, they cannot possibly hope to reunite with him, and he’s fucked it, he’s  _ fucked  _ it absolutely.

Five drives his fist into the metal side of the dumpster, and it feels good, to have that freezing burst of pain, so he does it again, and again, until his knuckles have split open and he’s bleeding into the trash, his fingers twitching from the staticky cloud of pain that’s overtaken them. 

Five stops, not because the pain is enough to deter him, but because his eyes fall upon the city paper, atop the rest of the rubble, having therefore been thrown out today.

Five snatches it, reading the date on the headline, and starts laughing.

He has eight days until the world ends, he realizes.

He’s gone and landed right back where he started. 

He… he can try again, then.

Five draws in a ragged breath. He can try again. All isn’t lost. He’s back in the past, and he can try again, and now that he knows the trigger to the apocalypse, he can stop it.

Five leaps out of the dumpster, tucking the newspaper in his arm, pacing restlessly, parsing it through.

He’d cleaved a hole through the fabric of time, slipping through, landing exactly when he’d landed last, albeit a little to the left. This raises the question of duplicates, of Five’s seven-days-younger self, but… no. That wouldn’t be right, would it?

A week ago, Five had never once run into his future self, and the world had still ended. He would not fail, would not hide so pathetically from himself, so he must conclude that he has not threaded himself into a time loop, but instead has broken with time entirely, folding it in on itself and creating an alternate dimension in which his younger self is not here at all. 

Right now, inside the mansion, his family are pouring their father out into the mud. There is no temporal storm spitting him out into their arms, because it’d deigned to send him here instead.

Five pauses for a moment, removes a bagel from where it’s been stuck to his shoulder.

He resumes thinking, pouring over the paper, muttering to himself about the variables that might ensue from his new arrival, how long it might be before the Commission determines where he’s hidden. 

Right. The Commission. Five curses. He has them to consider too; he’s going to have to forgo Delores entirely-- not that he’d bother returning to her, seeing as they’ve broken up for good, and for the better-- as Hazel and Cha-Cha will be laying in wait to ambush him at the Gimbel Brothers’ Department Store tomorrow. 

And beyond that, how’s he going to operate, interfering with the apocalypse, when they might ping him at any moment and send their dogs after him?

There’s movement at the end of the alley.

Immediately, Five’s on guard, leaning against the damp brick wall, flicking open the damp paper, pretending to be utterly uninterested in the figure shuffling uncertainly down towards the dumpster.

Initially, Five takes it for a homeless man, someone who’d have the need to check through his father’s dumpster for whatever castoffs might be found, and he’s content to leave him be.

Then, he recognizes the slope of the shoulders, the mess of brown hair falling in a style that Five finds uncomfortably similar to his own. 

The last time Five saw this man’s face, he realizes, it’d been mottled with blood and stiff with rigor mortis, with a splotch of cotton over the right eye.

It’s Leonard Peabody. It’s Harold Jenkins. It’s Haroleonard. 

The man who pulls the trigger is standing in front of him, rooting through his family’s trash.

Five wants to burst out laughing. 

Then, he sees Leonard jerk in excitement, pull something free and make a little sound of joy. He holds it up, and Five sees it: a red, leather-bound book with the initials R. H. emblazoned on it in gold.

He recognizes it immediately, even though he hasn’t seen it in person since he was thirteen. This is his father’s journal, the one he’d used to write everything in, which he’d hoarded carefully.

And Five gets it.

The question had crossed his mind a few times in the past week, the question of how exactly Leonard Peabody of all people had been able to pluck Vanya up and spirit her away, which had led to the question of how he’d been able to discover Vanya’s powers before her own family could.

And now he gets it. He’d had some help.

The second Leonard’s feet hit the pavement, Five’s upon him, catching him by the neck and driving his skull into the sharp metal corner of the dumpster, hard enough to stun, and send him dropping hard to the ground, but not to kill.

That’s alright. He has a little extra time to enjoy this.

And enjoy it he does. Five gets his hands around the column of Leonard’s throat, and gets to squeezing, watching the ways his eyes bug out and his mouth gapes like that of a fish’s, wishing for all the world that Leonard knew somehow, who he was, and why he was doing this.

He doesn’t like to kill, despite what many at the Commission seemed to think of him, his reputation being as big as it was. It’s that he’s good at it. He knows a dozen ways to snap a neck or stop a heartbeat, and though it gives him no pleasure, he’s confident in his ability and comfortable with it. 

This, though?

Alright, fine. He’s  _ really  _ loving this. Sue him.

Leonard dies, after a moment, and Five leaves him with a necklace of deep bruises. 

He wonders if the Commission knows now, or if not, when they’ll determine that Leonard Peabody is not going to be in place to seduce Vanya down the path to the end of the world. Whenever they find out, that’s when his problems will truly begin.

Regardless, the triggerman’s been removed from the equation. Now, Vanya will go about her week without interference.

Five stares down at the purplish face of his dead adversary, noting with more than a little bit of annoyance the resemblance between the two of them. 

(Secretly, he’s a little pleased that Vanya had chosen a man who’d looked so much like him. At least she has good taste.)

He climbs off his body, and takes the book off the ground, tucking it under his arm. There’ll be time to read it later, first he has to hide the body.

Five runs his fingers over the spine of the book, thinking a bit more on it.

Yes, he realizes, he’s killed the triggerman, but the trigger’s still  _ here, _ isn’t she?

Vanya is the cause of the apocalypse. This, he knows. 

It’ll be her, one way or another. Leonard’s dead, but who’s to say she might stumble across her power at some later date? Who’s to say the anger she’d had towards their family hadn’t been her own, after all, and that it won’t just stoke itself up in some other way?

Too many variables. 

Five knows what’s required of him. Knows he has a duty to his family, to the world, to fulfill it.

And, well. He’d be lying if he didn’t say he wasn't furious with her.

Vanya had killed the world. Seven billion people, and she’d killed every last one of them, and turned the entire earth into a graveyard, kicking up dust so thick that it took years before the sun would shine through to the earth. He’d been left to raise himself in the wake of her destruction. He’d spent forty years in the apocalypse, and only towards the end had the birds finally begun to sing again, the grass begun to poke through the ash, signaling the return of life. All of this death had been hers.

_ All of  _ their  _ deaths, _ Five realizes, recalling the bodies of his beloved siblings, laid side by side in the wreckage of the Icarus,  _ had been hers. _

There’d been one other, he remembers now.

One other body, among them, a little apart from the rest, so blackened and charred he couldn’t make out a single feature. 

Five realizes now, who it must have been.

_ That was you,  _ he thinks, as if Vanya might perk up her head and hear him somehow.  _ That was you. _

Of all those to burn, it seems she had been the first. 

With that quiet recognition, Five feels a burning, seething thing in him begin to sputter out.

He can’t kill her. He  _ can’t. _

He must stop her, must not leave her to her own devices, lest her bitterness come roiling up and her powers come tearing loose, but he can’t....

Oh.

Five gets it.

He knows what he has to do, and feels his gut turn in horrific guilt.

But it’s the ideal solution, isn’t it? Five has to keep her in his sight, has to keep a close eye on her to keep her off the path that’ll lead to the apocalypse, and he must do so without arousing the Commission’s attention.

The answer is laying in front of him, dead as can be. 

Five stares down at Leonard, and steels himself to the grim task ahead of him: He must steal Leonard Peabody's identity, and seduce Vanya.


	2. Chapter 2

Five prepares. 

He takes to the task with the intense, determined passion he’d always put into his missions. It’s good to focus on the work. Keeps all the worse impulses in check, all the bad thoughts prickling in the corners of his mind, all the shivering, wild feelings from unraveling him slowly, the way one might tug at the loose thread of a sweater until the whole sleeve’s a mess of yarn.

First, he disposes of the body. 

There are many ways to do it, ways he knows well, ways he’s practiced in his years with the Temps Commission, ways he’s studied, complete with pop quizzes and lab demonstrations, in lieu of an ordinary child’s home economics course back when he’d lived in the Academy. They’d been taught to save people, but also to cover their failures carefully.

He runs through them all: 

Woodchipper. Fitting, but inefficient given that they’re in the middle of the city.

City dump. Classic! Generic!

Alkaline hydrolysis. Fabulously effective in theory, but so dependent on a particular sort of machine that he finds it cumbersome in application.

Burning. Too bright, too obvious.

The Sagawa Method. Absolutely. Fucking. Not.

Fed to pigs. Poetic, but he’d have to go through the trouble of jumping out to the farms between the city and Jackpine, and it wouldn’t be worth the trouble.

In the end, he settles for the good ol’ tried-and-true roll-em-in-a-rug-and-toss-it-in-the-lake approach. Not particularly creative, he knows, but it gets the job done.

Before he disposes of the body, he handles the necessary obfuscation: he sands the man’s fingers and toes down to the bone to remove any prints, pries out each and every one of his teeth, and slices off his ears. Then, he carves up the mark’s face thoroughly enough to ensure no one should hope to identify it.

It’s gruesome work, and he downs half a bottle of wine to keep his hands from shaking, and he empties his stomach halfway through, but it has to be done, and so it is done. He does it in the house whose address was carved on the key in Peabody’s pocket, the one at 147 Murillo, the one less than an hour’s walk from the mansion, the one whose layout he vaguely knows from having been here only days ago, the one he doesn’t bother to explore beyond a momentary sweep to check if anyone else is present, before he could set to the business of butchering the man he’ll be replacing.

The sun rolls over the brick and glass and steel slopes of the city, and Five greets it having tossed Peabody into the lake with the aid of a boat he’d ‘borrowed’ from a nearby dock. He heads back to Leonard’s--  _ his  _ house, he keeps reminding himself, it’s  _ his  _ house now-- collapses on the couch, and spends the morning in a deathlike sleep.

He spends the afternoon on his knees, scrubbing blood and bone fragments from Leonard Peabody’s fine hardwood floors. 

Once that’s done, he takes stock of the house itself, scans it for clues he might use to fill in his impression of Peabody. It’s admittedly nice, if old, filled with delicate pieces of furniture that don’t look like they’re meant to be sat on, with little glass figurines and plates mounted on top of doorways, yellow silk sheets in the master bedroom. He gets the sense that a little old lady had lived here long before Leonard had, and he hadn’t seen fit to change the decor. Five can’t begrudge him it, having been raised in a house that was mostly museum himself.

There’s a photo on the mantle, of a delicate old woman and the man Five had just dropped in pieces into the lake, who he presumes correctly is his grandmother. So, he concludes, perhaps that had been the case. Five takes the photo, and destroys it. He does the same with any image containing an adult Leonard Peabody, of which there are only a handful. 

He finds a series of invoices addressed to Imperial Woodwares; this, he presumes, is the store to which Leonard had a key, a store which he owns, which Five now owns.

Five jumps there, finds it closed for the day, slips inside, and browses the aisles, mazelike and stacked high with furniture and decorative carvings that Five will admit are actually quite impressive. Fine, the guy had a trade. He can respect that.

Five is particularly impressed with the massive swordfish mounted on the wall, climbing up an antique chair to get a closer look at it, to see if the inside of its mouth is hollow, and if it might be a good place to store a gun or blow dart of some kind in case of a robbery.

He touches it just a little, he promises, really just a tap of the finger, and the whole thing comes crashing down, utterly demolishing an entire wall of merchandise.

“Shit,” Five says. 

In looking over the store, and its many facets of business, Five realizes that he might be screwed, at least in the department of running the shop. Imperial Woodwares is known for handcrafted furniture and art that he can’t craft by hand, custom orders that he can’t fill, restoration repair and refinishing work that he can’t restore, repair or refinish.

He’s definitely going to run this place into the ground. Within the next month, easily. 

Oh well.

Five returns to the house that is now his, takes the information he’s obtained about his alias and constructs a mental timeline. He repeats it to himself over and over, certain to get the story straight: After his release, he’d gone back to live with his grandmother, who’d died of natural enough causes judging by the medical bills filed away in the home office. He’d changed his name from Harold Jenkins to Leonard Peabody, and at some point had gone from employee to owner of Imperial Woodwares, even done a little charity work (Five chalks this up to the duality of man. Crazy murderous stalkers can have trades and do nice things sometimes, who knew?).

Once done, Five sets to work tearing out the murder shrine of his family that his predecessor had built into his attic. It won’t do, to have Vanya discover it when he inevitably has her over to his house. He’d have a lot of explaining to do.

Plus, it’s just especially vindicating, setting all those posters and action figures and comics on fire in the trash can in his front yard. Feels good, feels right.

After, Five settles in on the couch. He puts a pillow over the spot where, in the other timeline, he’d seen the stain that had communicated to him exactly what Vanya and Leonard had been doing on it. In this timeline, it won’t exist, but the memory of it will.

Five pages through his father’s journal, learning a lot of things, the most pertinent of them being that he wants to return to the house just to beat Reginald’s ashes with a baseball bat. 

And he curls up to sleep on said couch, the weight of what he’s about to do weighing heavily on him. He doesn’t know why it bothers him so much. He’s done much worse. And he can’t kill her.

Last week, which had also been last night, he’d been talking to her in her apartment, and he’d left. 

Had he stayed... 

No. Enough of that. 

He didn’t. He  _ didn’t, _ and now here they all are. No use crying over spilt milk, over worlds ended, over mistakes made. All one can really do is pick themselves up, wipe the blood from their mouth, and set to work on surviving with what they have.

And what he has is his mission. Keep Vanya close, save the world.

He doesn’t sleep well, not at all.

But he gets up the next morning, and gets to it. Five’s anxious to get this under way, as much as there’s a knot in his stomach at the thought of it.

He isn’t sure where or how Leonard first approaches Vanya, but the best he can figure is that it has to happen today at the latest. He swallows the awful sticky feeling in his gut, and sets to it.

It’d be too suspicious to turn up at her apartment, so he heads to the Icarus, knowing that on that theater’s stage she will destroy the world in a mere seven days. In all likelihood, she will practice there, at least once during the week. So, Five slips in the back entrance, plucks the orchestra’s schedule from the conductor’s bag while he’s having a particularly nasty shit, and memorizes it.

As luck would have it, they’re practicing in a side theater today, on one of the smaller stages. So, he slips in the back, and sits in the darkest corner of the audience, and feels his heart skip a beat when he sees her bolting in, crying out a shaky apology for being so late.

He stays quiet, watches her free her violin from its case and watches her music weave into the rest of the orchestra’s.

Five feels a bit like a serial killer, sitting here and watching as he is, so he steps outside when practice ends, waiting by the door to catch her as she leaves. He practices it over and over: he’s going to bump into her, throw up his hands in apology, blush and invite her for dinner. He has no idea how to flirt, but he’s pretty sure this is how it’s done.

It takes a while for her to appear; the stream of musicians fades to a trickle by the time she comes stepping out into the overcast afternoon. 

She’s there, in front of him, and there’s a knot in his gut. Fear and excitement and want and guilt all wrapped up around her, and it’s enough to make his stomach turn, to make him want to turn tail and leap away to the nearest rooftop, to gather himself, like a skittish teenager.

But he can’t. He has a mission to complete. 

Vanya’s got her head dipped down, loose strands of hair falling in front of her face, and she’s taking small quick steps, her hands folded tightly around the strap holding her violin to her back. 

He knows that gait, knows that though time changes many things, it’s unlikely that the meaning of this way of walking won’t have changed; she’s going to cry.

There’s his opening.

So, Five heads up to her, hands in his pockets, leaning in to ask her, softly, with concern he isn’t faking at all, if she’s alright.

Which, clearly she isn’t, but it’s an opening, and he’ll take it.

Vanya is staring at him, her lips parted and her pupils dilating. She says nothing, only opening and closing her mouth uncertainly. It seems like there’s a spark of recognition in her eyes, and Five feels a sonic blast of panic begin sounding in the back of his head.

_ Fuck. _ Five draws upon all of his many years of training to keep from turning and bolting.

Does she recognize him? Had Jenkins been in contact with her up until this point? Had he been mistaken?

No, Five concludes, as Vanya’s cheeks flush pink. She doesn’t recognize him at all; her shock is that of a woman who isn’t used to being approached at all. She isn’t surprised that Five is before her, she’s surprised that anyone at all has seen her in distress, and cared enough to ask her about it.

And she likes his attention, if the quirk in the corner of her lip, and the way she dips her head to adjust a strand of hair that’d fallen loose from her bun and tuck it behind her ear, is any indication.

This will be easy. Thank  _ God, _ it’ll be easy.

“Yes,” she lies, “I’m fine.”

“Oh.” He decides to let it slide, and the silence stretches between them like a rubber band. He hurries to snap it, before he loses his chance.

“You know,” he says, “I, uh, I was in there, listening to the orchestra.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, I like coming by and listening now and again. It’s nice, you know?” Five feels his toe tapping nervously into the pavement. He has no idea how to handle this. “I mean, I heard you play specifically. You’re a violinist, right?”

Vanya glances over her shoulder at the violin case mounted on her back. “Well, it’s not a cello.”

“Right, so. Uh. I just wanted to tell you that you… play nice.”

He craves death immediately. God above, open the earth beneath his feet and swallow him.

Vanya blushes.

Okay.  _ Okay. _ He’s still in business. He can still do this. 

And then they’re walking. 

It surprises Five a bit, at how quick she is to agree to let him walk with her, making a passing excuse about his place being just past the street he knows her apartment is on (which, well. It’s in the same general direction, but is far from walking distance to her walkup). 

Then again. Vanya’d taken Leonard to meet the family, according to Allison and Diego, within days of getting together with him. She’s starving for attention; it’s blinding her from basic sense. All the better for him, he guesses. 

Vanya starts stiltedly, then more and more animated, even as her voice goes hoarse. The key, he knows, to getting Vanya talking, is to ask her about something she cares about, something she knows.

So, when he asks her about her violin, about how long she’s been playing, her favorite composers, her opinion on the piece the group’s rehearsing for the concert this coming week, she comes to life in front of him. It’s like he’s watching the years shed from her shoulders, and the sharp, sarcastic child he’d once known is emerging from where she’d hidden deep within Vanya to protect herself from the cold world.

He’s happy to listen, to keep her talking. The less he has to say about himself, the less he has to lie, the better it’ll feel. And besides, no one paid her any attention, even up until the very end. Frankly, he thinks it fair that she be the focus of this interaction.

It’s going well, so far, he thinks. Vanya mentions that she doesn’t have anything else to do, that she’s free for the rest of the afternoon, and he’s working up the courage to ask her to keep walking with him, past her apartment, maybe to take the bus down to Morrison Park…

But then, Vanya’s gaze floats past him, to the street ahead, and he watches her poke her head back into her proverbial shell.

Five frowns, and glances over at… Allison.

It’s Allison.

Oh, fuck him, it’s fucking  _ Allison. _

All the blood surges from his face immediately. Fuck. Fuck, what if she recognizes him, what if she blows it all, what if--

Allison has seen them, is clicking over in her heeled boots, her hands folded guardedly over her middle, displaying her fancy handbag. She’s dressed like she’s going to battle, covered from the neck down, and it takes her a full minute to compute that he’s beside Vanya.

Five goes rigid, does everything in his power to remain nonchalant and disinterested as Allison’s eyes sweep over him, then past him. 

She doesn’t recognize him at all.

But clearly, she expects  _ him  _ to recognize her, Allison Hargreeves, international superstar and newly-crowned America’s Sweetheart according to the copy of  _ A-List  _ that Five had found carefully annotated in Leonard’s glove box. Allison has always been a creature who fed on praise and attention, and he can tell that she’s expecting it now, especially when Vanya introduces her with a nervous little quirk in her voice, one he knows implicitly is a sign that she’s terrified he’ll forget her entirely now that a more relevant Hargreeves is facing him.

Five nods coolly, giving Allison a terse nod and a quick, formal quirk of the lip, replying, “O- _ kay.” _

And the look on Allison’s face, the way her eyes bug out and her lower lip twitches, as though he’d reached out and slapped her, is worth  _ everything. _

(For that matter, the way Vanya lifts her shoulders up just a bit at the realization that he finds her preferable to a global superstar is also worth everything, but in a very different way.)

Vanya asks Allison what she’s doing here, and Five stays quiet. He actually  _ doesn’t  _ know any of this himself; on this day, a timeline ago, he’d been banging his foot into the side of a stolen plumbers’ van, to keep it from falling asleep on his fool’s errand. He’d been entirely absent from the family goings-on, and crashed in well past midnight.

And then Allison tells her, and he remembers:  _ Mom.  _

Or, rather, Grace; he’s of the same opinion as Luther and Ben when it comes to her status as a caregiver.

Today is the day that the family will argue about what’s to be done with her. Last he heard, Luther was convinced she’d poisoned their father, which Five could honestly care less about. To be perfectly frank, if she’d done it, then good on her for reaching self-actualization. And if she didn’t, who cares.

Anyway. Allison’s asking Vanya to come along to a family meeting to determine Grace’s fate, which Five will most certainly not be allowed to attend. Which is fine by him. It buys him time to plan his next move.

Vanya apologizes, digging her toe into the sidewalk, and Five shakes it off.

“Family shit,” he says with a shrug, “Can’t be avoided.”

This, at least, he isn’t lying about.

“But,” he adds, “You could make it up to me with… dinner, maybe? Tomorrow night?”

Vanya beams.

“Yeah, she says, “I’d like that.”

A funny sensation comes over Five, a rush of warmth, as he listens to her outline a time he can pick her up from her apartment. 

He can do this, he knows with absolute certainty, as he watches Vanya trot off with Allison to a waiting taxi. He can  _ definitely  _ do this.

In fact, he knows in a gut-deep way that make his insides churn with guilt, that he's going to enjoy this very much.


	3. Chapter 3

Five spends the next day running his false namesake’s business into the ground.

He does it to kill time, initially, but as it turns out, woodworking is  _ hard. _

He likes to tell himself that all the horrible mistakes he’s making are intentional slights, designed to stoke the misery of his nemesis’s ghost (which, being Klaus’s brother, makes him vaguely aware of the possibility that the vengeful wraith of Leonard Peabody may be bound to him, forced to watch him for all of eternity). He imagines Leonard, clawing at his ghost-hair and screaming ghost-screams about how Five’s  _ not meant to do it like that. _

It’s a nice thought. It even makes him whistle while he works.

Anyway. He tells himself it’s intentional, that he meant to yell at three customers over the phone, and two in person. That he was making an artistic choice, in nearly taking his own arm off with a saw that, in his defense, did  _ not  _ look  _ that  _ hard to use.

Regardless, time flies away from him, and he spends it staring anxiously at the clock, fully aware that attaching himself to Vanya’s hip will only lead to trouble, but the hours till doomsday are running thin and he can’t afford to fuck this up.

Finally, the hour they’ve agreed upon arrives, and Five drives out to retrieve her.

He pulls up to her apartment fifteen minutes early, only to find that Vanya is waiting already, and has probably been standing on the curb, wringing her hands, for quite some time.

She dressed up, he sees; she’s wearing that suit she’ll wear in a few days to kill the world, assuming that he doesn’t stop her. Her hair’s down, and there’s a smear of lipstick on her mouth. She looks extremely overdressed for a first date, like she doesn’t know at all what to expect. She looks… nice.

Five, in contrast, is wearing another of Leonard’s dull button-downs. He wonders if it’s not too late to pull over, to jump home and dig through his new closet for a suit.

Then, Vanya turns her head, and he sees her brighten with recognition. That nixes that option. 

He gets out, goes to talk to her for a minute, watches her point up to the second-floor strip of windows above the A.V. store that she introduces as her apartment.

To his dismay, she’s still keeping them open, and he brings it up to her with a scowl.

Because  _ honestly. _ Imagine all the freaks that could get in. 

Vanya stares at his assertion that she needs to get locks on them with a look of indulgent exasperation, rolling her eyes. 

But she gets in the truck, and agrees to let him take her on a date, so he chooses to take it as proof that she’ll take his superior knowledge into account. He’s an assassin, you see, he knows these things.

They start driving, and Five makes sure to keep his eyes on the road. He’s a fairly mediocre driver, having mostly handled transportation with his power, so he feels especially vulnerable behind the wheel of a car, always careful to keep at exactly the speed limit.

“Where are we going?” Vanya asks.

Fuck, where  _ are  _ they going? He hasn’t thought this far ahead yet. He’s an  _ idiot. _

“It’s a surprise.” 

Five doesn’t know the city well at all, only remembers a few places he’d visited as a child, the rubble he’d climbed as a teenager, and as a hitman, he’d been kept away from it on all assignments, save one in 1938.

There’s one place he knows, that he knows they both like.

In this universe, there isn’t a sheet of plastic covering the windowed front of Griddy’s, because he never engaged in a shootout here. In this universe, it’s just a shitty coffee-and-doughnuts place that does well enough with the customers it has, but is by no means a must-eat destination. In this universe, the only significance it holds is as a nexus of nostalgia for a litter of children who’d stolen out to it late in the night a handful of times as preteens.

He pulls up, parking halfway up the curb, because Peabody’s truck is a piece of fucking trash, and some small, immature part of Five’s ego loves the grinding of the tires against the curb.

He’s concerned it won’t be enough, but she’s pleased; she has that soft little smile on her face, the one he remembers from when they were both children, when they’d slip out together with the rest of their pack to eat doughnuts until they’d get sick, to pretend like they were a pack of schoolmates who were slipping out of separate apartments, outsmarting normal parents who loved them to have a few nights of childish rebellion before shipping off to school the next day (It was a fun game, but thinking about it now just makes him horribly sad).

His destroyer of worlds does a tiny little skip as she hops off the street after him, and her hand is warm and calloused in his as he pulls her after him into the restaurant.

For some reason, her touch is like a livewire’s; when she lets go to pick out their seats, at the very booth they’d crowded into as kids, he flexes the fingers of the hand she’d held a few times, to keep them from shaking.

They sit, and the worn pleather seat sags beneath him. Below the table, the pointed toes of her boots tap at his shins mistakenly, and then hurriedly pull away. 

Around them, Five is pleased to see that there’s only a trio of other customers, seated at the counter with their backs to them, chatting softly together. It’s good, no one will talk to them, no one will notice.

Their server, a kindly old woman by the name of Agnes, takes their orders, a pair of doughnuts, a platter of greasy cheese curds, black coffee for him, and vanilla for her, and they settle in to talk.

It starts, as he supposes most adult conversations do, with the weather. How it looks to clear up by the end of the week, how Channel 24 was full of shit when they said there’d only be a chance of rain, when they’ve already had days of downpour.

Then it shifts, as, again, most adult conversations probably do, to work. To Vanya’s violin, and her status as the third chair of the city’s most prominent orchestra, a topic he can tell that weighs on her. From what he gathers, the first chair, Helen Cho, is a bit of a bitch.

_ Not a bit of a bitch, a full-grown bitch,  _ he corrects when he finds out she’d been why Vanya had been upset yesterday. 

She asks him about his own work, and Five freezes up a bit, pulling the mask down and setting to work weaving his lie.

“I’m a woodworker.”

“And what does that entail?”

“Well. I, uh. I work my wood.”

Wait.

Fuck.

Vanya stares at him, the same tired, indulgent, you’re-damn-lucky-I-like-you-and-will-therefore-tolerate-this-joke stare he remembers from when he was thirteen, and the rush of warmth that floods his chest at the memory of long afternoons spent quietly hissing snarky comments back and forth is such a bright, glowing feeling, that he doesn’t mind making a fool of himself at all.

“Really though,” he says, “I carve things. And I fix things. And I… finish them. Just last week, I made this big wooden fish. Huge thing, really, you could probably fit in its belly. I think it’d be really valuable as a drug stash.”

“... Is that why you made it? As a drug stash?”

“Oh, shit, uh. No. Not at all.” Five rubs the back of his neck. “I made it because… well. I don’t actually know why I made it. I just went into a trance, woke up six hours later, and I had this big wooden fish.”

The two of them devolve into raucous laughter. 

The conversation drifts to family, another typical topic, the messy one they’ll have to get past at some point.

Five tells the truth, and not the truth; he’d only ever had a father, and has no memory of his mother. Then, he paints the picture with a stroke of Peabody: his mother’d died having him. Which may well apply to Five, but he wouldn’t know; their father always kept the records pertaining to their birth mothers so securely sequestered that he has no idea where they are.

“Oh,” Vanya says, bringing a hand up to her mouth, “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. I never knew her, so I can’t be sad.” Not a lie: He doesn’t think of his birth mother at all; what would be the point?

Vanya nods quietly. It’s the same with her, he knows. 

“My father’s dead now,” Five says, recalling the facts of Jenkins’ file, which Allison had read aloud for them in the other timeline on their drive over to his house, “He has been for a long time.” 

He leaves out the bit about Leonard having been responsible for his death. There’s a reason why he changed his name, after all. It’s rough, having death hang over you since you were a preteen; this is another thing the two of them have in common, and he hates it. 

“That’s terrible.”

“He was a bad man. I’m happy he’s dead.” Not a lie.

Vanya picks up where he left off: “Funny you mention that. My dad died this week, actually. And you know, I’m still not sure how I feel about it.”

Five reaches across the table slowly, tangling her fingers loosely with his.

He changes the subject to a slightly less loaded topic: their living family.

In part, this is to discern what’d happened at the family meeting. Not only is this customary and required of him, according to traditional dating rituals, but this is also necessary information. If anything happened at the meeting that might affect the apocalypse, he needs to know.

It’s nothing. Just Luther, ineptly trying to lead a vote on how best to switch their mother off, and Diego clowning around, making another weak power play. How disappointing.

Five shrugs it off, cracks a joke about being grateful to be an only child, and she laughs weakly.

Silence descends on them, and Five slurps from his coffee, tugging playfully on one of her fingers.

She’s disappearing into herself again. Some worry has swept in and possessed her, like a specter, and now it’s on him to exorcise it, but he has to find a way to do so without overstepping. 

Vanya worries her lip between her teeth, then slowly looks up at him. 

“Did you recognize her?”

“Who?”

“My sister.”

Oh. Right. Allison. Something in their interaction yesterday might’ve tipped her off. 

“Yes, I did.”

It’s the right answer, the honest answer. If Five said anything else, she’d be suspicious.

Vanya pales, and her mouth sets in a worried line, but she seems to think something over. “So you know what she does. What she did. What she is.”

He gets it: it’s about Allison’s fame. She needs to be sure he isn’t using her as a stepping stone to get to her more glamorous sister.

“Yeah, I guess. You know, honestly, I never cared for that Umbrella thing,” Five answers, feeling the honesty slip out of him, “I mean, I was caught up in it when it first happened, sure, I don’t think there was a single thirteen-year-old in the world who wasn’t obsessed with it. You know, the uniforms and the masks, and the crimefighting and the international travel? So big and bright and glamorous. But you know, after a few months, it kinda lost its luster for me. It got old real quickly, and I figured it was all a load of crap anyway. Same shit every time, and how much are they really helping, you know?”

She smiles. 

“As for Allison, I mean. I know she’s famous and all, but I haven’t seen a single one of her movies.”

This is true, mostly because he never found any copies of her films among the rubble of the movie theaters and video stores he’d scavenged in. If he had, he’d have given anything to see Allison’s face, bright and vibrant and  _ alive, _ even if it were delivering an utterly mediocre performance. 

But she doesn’t need to know that.

“I guess they’re just not for me,” he lies. “I mean, does the world really need another  _ Love On Loan?” _ (No, it doesn’t.)

“So I take it you’re not really up on the tabloids, then.”

“I could honestly care less about the goings-on of celebrities.” True. “In fact the Academy is of no interest to me.” Lie.

“Then I suppose you…” Vanya’s nails are digging into the chipped table; she’s nervous. “You haven’t read my book, then.”

“Oh. No, I read that.” 

Vanya goes pale.

“It was the only thing about the Academy I’d encountered in years. Found it in the library, actually. In fact I kinda stumbled across it; I was looking for just about anything else, and it just jumped out at me, and I had to pick it up.”

“Yeah?” She says it quietly, and he can see her shrinking back against the seat.

He remembers the conversation they’d had the day he’d first returned. The anxiety hanging over her like a fine mist, the way she clearly deeply regretted it, the way she was convinced her siblings hated her for it.

He’d dismissed her then, but  _ well. _ Seven days later, he was at the center of a meeting discussing how they’d kill her, so the joke’s on him.

“I loved it,” he says, entirely truthfully. “In fact, it found me at a very important time in my life, and it helped get me back on track.”

“Oh.” Vanya blinks quickly. “Really?”

“Yes. I thought it was ballsy, and honest, and sincere. And it gave me more inspiration than I think you can imagine.” 

Vanya’s face has turned bright pink, and she drops her eyes to the table. She doesn’t let go of his hand, only tightens her grip.

Five sips his coffee, and moves to spin the conversation into another direction: the books they like. 

Time flies on, and before he knows it, his coffee’s gone cold, and an entirely different set of diners has arrived. They’ve moved from fiction, to music, to travel, to an unexpectedly heated discussion on what breed of dog is superior, and Five’s talked himself hoarse.

Vanya glances down at her watch, and blinks.

It’s been three hours, and Vanya has practice tomorrow, so she has to head home. 

They pay, and head out at last.

“This is so bizarre,” she says, on the drive back, “I’ve known you for a day, and it already feels like I know you better than anyone in my family.”

Five looks over at her, watching the way the passing street lights flash over the panes of her face, and feels his gut clench.

He accompanies her up her creaky stairs and to her door, content to stay in her shadow as he asks about when they might see each other again. 

“The sooner the better,” he stresses, and watches Vanya blush.

Vanya thanks him sincerely, and even though the door to her apartment’s open, she hovers in the threshold for a while, talking quietly with him about how her practice lets out at the same time tomorrow, how if it isn’t too much trouble, he can find her there. He agrees to it, and watches her shoulders pull back, just a bit.

She seems reluctant to close the door on him, and a part of Five knows that all he has to do is to ask to come inside for a nightcap, and she’ll let him.

It’d be too far, he knows. Too soon. 

He makes to leave, wishing her a good night, and Vanya catches him gently by the wrist, pulling him carefully down so she can give him a light kiss on the cheek. It’s chaste and quick, yet somehow, there’s lightning spiking down his spine. 

She looks up at him nervously, like she’s crossed some line.

Five decides to show her that she hasn’t at all, turning to take her gently by the back of her head, and dipping to kiss her deeply. When he pulls back, there are stars in her eyes.

Then, he’s on his way, waving at her dark shadow in the window as he gets in the truck that isn’t technically his, and putters off.

It’s a weird sensation, driving. Gives you a lot of time to think, the time Five never has, because the nature of his power has always allowed him to act on impulse and flit anywhere he pleased, anytime he pleased. On the road, there’s a finite time he has to stick to, and it’s quite annoying, but he’d be lying if he said he didn’t understand some of the appeal.

He has a lot of time to be alone with his thoughts, to run over the date in his mind and pick it with a fine-toothed comb.

She likes him. She likes him a lot. That's good; she's eating out of the palm of his hand already, and will be beholden to him in the days to come. With his influence, he's sure she can be dissuaded from the path to Armageddon.

And, well. He’d had _fun._ He’d liked it a lot more than he thought he would.

That’s the problem.

He’s always liked Vanya, always had a particular soft spot for her that now, with the time to turn those feelings over and examine them, he recognizes for what they are. He knows that had things transpired slightly differently for them, had the world been kind or even just  _ less cruel, _ they’d be doing the exact same thing, without the false name hanging over them like the Sword of Damocles. 

But they didn’t. And here they are, and here they go, and he won’t stop. He  _ can’t  _ stop, there’s so much at stake. There’s the _world_ on the line.

And, tucked away in the corner of his heart, there’s a selfish, living urge, worming its way through his chest cavity. There’s the world, of course, and he’ll tell himself that over and over as he falls asleep tonight, but even if there hadn’t been one, he knows he’d be doing the same damn thing. There’s the world, but there’s also _her._

_It would be easier,_ he thinks bitterly, _if I hated her, if I didn't care at all._

But he doesn't, does he?

So Five sits in the dark, staring at the cracks in the ceiling, letting the messy black sludge of guilt co-mingle with the warm bloom of affection, until he can't separate them at all anymore.

If this is what it takes, he'll do it.


	4. Chapter 4

Five is there to greet her on her walk home from practice, as he was days ago. It’s a pleasant enough day to sit on the curb; the sky is still overcast, but this time, it’s a light shade of silver, unlikely to start spitting. He can see the pale white disc of the sun, can look at it freely with a veil of clouds concealing it, and he wonders if what he’s doing will be enough to save the moon.

The side-door to the Icarus opens, and he turns, peering past a stream of classical musicians in search of Vanya.

Vanya still emerges at the rear of the pack; she probably does this intentionally, so she has more time to herself, so no one will be angry with her for holding up the line. This time, she’s looking for him when she steps outside, pausing in the doorway to scan the street with a furrow in her brow.

When she catches sight of him, she gives him a bright, excitable smile, like she wasn’t so sure he’d be here at all, and he grins back.

Behind her is a tense-looking woman with a rigid set to her small, pinched mouth, like a frog’s. Her sharp eyebrows are raised critically, and her eyes narrow in annoyance. She’s clearly not someone who likes to wait around, and Five’s assumption is correct, when she shoulders roughly past Vanya, and strides off stiffly.

Five makes note of the violin case at her back, and asks, “First Chair Helen?”

“The very same.”

Five grimaces in exaggerated fashion, and Vanya chokes on a laugh. 

“Any problems today? With her, I mean.”

“No.”

“Well, if that changes…”

“You’ll what?”

“What makes you think  _ I’ll  _ do anything?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Vanya shrugs, moves the strap from one shoulder to another and tugs at it. “You’re real interested, is all.”

“Yeah, I’ll have you know I have my basement set aside just for her. Got the torture rack all set up and everything.”

“Oh, what the  _ fuck?” _ Vanya snorts.

“Was that one not a winner? That joke not doing it for you?”

“Not really, no.”

Five rolls his eyes, extending an arm, and Vanya folds her hand into the crook of his elbow, leaning neatly into his shoulder as they begin the long, meandering walk to her apartment.

There’s less of a dance of words this time, seeing as they’ve broken the ice, and are comfortable enough to skip the formalities. 

Instead, they settle immediately into bickering, the kind of companionate arguing over tiny things that don’t matter in the slightest that people who know each other deeply engage in. 

The subject: Vanya’s deep, all-encompassing love for  _ The Phantom of the Opera, _ which came up in passing during their dinner the previous night, and is brought up again when they pass by a framed poster outside the Icarus, announcing a touring production’s coming shows in May.

Vanya mentions, a little sheepishly, that she’d seen the production every single night the tour had been in town a few years ago, and will likely do so again when it circles back this coming summer, and Five breaks out in laughter at the thought, picturing her eagerly missing rent in order to watch the same show over and over.

Five has never understood the concept of musical theatre, whereas Vanya admits it’s hit-or-miss with her, but this specific show, whatever it is about it, has apparently captured her heart. Vanya had always been so secretive, growing up. He couldn’t even get her to play her music in front of him until the few scant months before he’d left, and even then, he’d always have to coax it out of her, and she’d always look away from him as she performed. 

He understood why then, of course, as he does now: she had learned like the rest of their siblings to hide each and every one of the things she’d cared about deep inside of her to protect them. Still, he felt that they might make exceptions for one another, as Luther and Allison had made exceptions for each other. They just hadn’t gotten there in time, he supposes.

So now, hearing her chat freely about the appeal of gothic romance, offering to lend him a few books to see if they’re to his taste as well, it strikes him how much she’s grown, how even though she’s far from confident, she’s open and eager in a way she hadn’t been when they were young.

It makes him pull her closer, just a bit, to rest his chin on her head for a few strides, and he hears her squeak in delight beneath him.

It isn’t normal, Five knows, to be this comfortable together after one date, but he knows where the old familiarity is coming from. It isn’t the mask he’s put on, or even her own hunger for love of any sort; it’s  _ them, _ some echo of what they’d once had together roiling up from deep within them and snapping back into place.

The argument ends in Five suggesting, quite nonchalantly, that when the company passes through in May, they make an evening of it, and they will see if he’s converted. 

Vanya is quite for a moment, and then nods, pleased.

(And then Five realizes: he’s made plans for months in the future. It’s less than a week until the end of the world, and he’s already imagining what comes next, already imagining the two of them, still together, afterwards.)

They make it to her apartment, where Vanya pulls him along after her, inviting him to have lunch with her.

He tells her, quite seriously, that he intends to have locks installed on her windows; god forbid any rapists get any ideas.

And Vanya is so distracted with turning to groan at him, that she doesn’t notice at all that her door is ajar.

Five does. 

He moves quickly, gently squeezing past Vanya, stalking up to the door on the balls of his feet. He doesn’t have a weapon with him, but if he acts fast enough, then he can definitely defeat who’s behind the door, even if he isn’t using his teleportation. He was trained well, and is very good at what he does, after all.

He runs through a gamut of possibilities: rapists (of course), or a pesky landlord (this, he files under ‘would-be rapists’), or a vengeful ex (as with the former, filed under ‘would-be rapists’), or a pack of Temps assassins (he can’t file anything yet, not until he knows who was sent for them).

Five throws open the door, and it’s--

“... Allison?” Vanya squawks.

Five groans. 

Their dear, meddling sister is sitting in the chair by the fireplace, the one that Five had occupied days ago in the timeline that wasn’t. She is digging her lacquered nails nervously into the upholstery, and seems like she’s been here for quite some time.

“Vanya!” Allison beams, rising to her feet, then immediately sours at the sight of him. “I tried to catch you outside your rehearsal but you weren’t there, and…”

“Leonard,” Five supplies, the words rolling unnaturally off his tongue.

“Right.” She looks at him as though he were a cat, dragging in a dead bird onto Vanya’s doorstep, then steps pointedly around him to place a hand on Vanya’s shoulder.

“Listen,” Allison says, “I’m going to need to ask your friend to leave--”

“Friend?” parrots Vanya.

“And why would I need to do that?” Five bristles.

“Because I’m about to have a very serious conversation with my sister about a family matter, and you’re not family.” 

Five glares.

Vanya returns her hand to his arm, squeezing possessively and rolling her shoulders back. “Whatever you have to say to me, you can say in front of him.”

Allison’s eyes roll down to look at Vanya’s grip on him, with clear disdain. “And you’ve been dating him for…  _ how  _ long?”

Which, fine. She has a point, he’ll give her that much. They’re moving at a ridiculous speed. By the end of the month, they’ll have probably moved in together and will be adopting their first cat. He should make a list of names. 

“Look,” Five says, “Are you going to say something or not?”

Allison huffs. “Fine. Don’t say I didn’t warn you, Vanya. Mom’s dead.”

“What?” they reply in unison.

“Yeah. She shut down last night. Apparently Diego changed his mind, and decided to do it himself. I wanted to tell you, because I think you should come by and say goodbye.”

“Oh,” Vanya says, and her grip on him loosens. “Oh, I guess that is important, I…”

She looks to him.

“If you want, I can go.”

“No, I…”

“... Or I could come along?”

Vanya nods.

“My God,” Allison groans, “Fine. Can we go please? I have a cab out front.”

The ride over is dead silent, the three of them crowded together in the back, Five sandwiched between both of his sisters, sensing Allison watching him warily in the rearview mirror. 

Suppose he succeeds, and he  _ will _ succeed; he’ll be living this life forever, won’t he? He’ll have to go by the name of Leonard Peabody for the rest of his life, will have to endure sharp looks from his siblings, unable to ever tell them who he is. He’ll be walking on eggshells around them forever, always prepared to deflect from the truth.

_ God, _ Five thinks,  _ it’ll be exhausting. But it has to be done. _

It doesn’t get any less awkward when they get to the house. Five is careful to let Vanya lead, and focuses entirely on her, on the way she keeps glancing over her shoulder nervously at him, like the floor will open up and he’ll disappear into it. He’ll do what he can to avoid Allison; he can’t have her digging for information. She’ll find the police file if she gets Diego involved, which she might, and that’ll be a mess he won’t be able to fix.

_ Maybe,  _ he thinks as Allison leads them into the parlor, where the rest of the family is congregated,  _ I should just set the precinct’s records room on fire. Would that be excessive? Nah, it’s perfectly logical. Now, where can I get my hands on enough accelerant to get this done... _

Inside the parlor, the stiff metal shell of Grace is seated on a couch, staring blankly into dead space. He doesn’t have to pretend to be utterly unsettled by her, or to not want to go anywhere near her.

Luther and Pogo are hovering around her, and they make way for Vanya easily.

Five keeps his distance, making a beeline for the bar, where the rest of his surviving brothers are seated. 

He has a considerable challenge ahead of him, maintaining his cover surrounded by his family, and pretending like he has no idea who they are or what they’ve been doing for the past few days.

It’s gonna be fucking hilarious.

He slinks calmly right between Klaus and Diego, relishing the way they jerk back in absolute surprise, and heads behind the bar. 

There, he immediately selects the most expensive bottle of alcohol, the six-figure Bowmore ‘57, the one their father drank only a single shot of every year, and with practiced nonchalance, pours himself and Vanya each a generous glassful.

He listens to Klaus whimper, and draws upon all of his strength to keep his smirk from showing. 

After a minute, Vanya pads over to them, and he hears her introducing him to the family as Leonard (a name that simply does not fit him, no matter how well he’s tried it on), her boyfriend (a title that fits him quite well, that he finds he likes very much).

Naturally, there’s a chorus of sputtering at the proclamation. 

Five hands her the drink he’d prepared. She doesn’t like scotch, he knows by now, and to be perfectly honest, he doesn't either, but the both of them clink their glasses and take it down smugly. It’s the principle of the thing that matters, not the drink itself. It’s the way Klaus’s jaw is hanging open in utter confusion, and how Diego’s face is twitching like Grace’s does when her batteries are low, and the way Luther is utterly still, and Allison’s face is turning a very lovely shade of purple.

That? Oh,  _ that’s  _ fucking priceless. 

Five loves his family dearly, but he also loves fucking with them, just a little. The instincts he’d gained during the pranks he’d pulled with Klaus when they were eleven have stayed with him all these years, have sharpened into a talent for a more vicious sort of mischief.

He finishes his drink quickly, listening to the family awkwardly try to ply Vanya for information she clings to like a wolverine clings to its kills, and follows her out when she turns to leave. 

Five is very, very lucky that no one looked at the portrait and put two and two together. He needs to be more careful than this. He can’t afford to fuck this up.

They’re almost out of the house, are stepping out of the door, when naturally, Allison cries out to them.

_ Fuck, _ Five thinks. 

But no, she hasn’t noticed anything at all. She just wants to get drinks with Vanya tomorrow night, and throws a pointed glance at him when she insists she wants a girls’ night.

And he gets it: she wants to wedge herself between them. Knowing her, he also gets why: she misses her child dearly, and is desperately trying to compensate. 

He feels for her, he does. But now’s just not the time for all of this; once the world’s saved, he’ll be more than happy to share Vanya with their nosy, but well-intentioned sister.

But for now, not a chance.

Five folds an arm over Vanya’s shoulders, and tells Allison to kindly fuck off. 

The door swings shut on her, and it stays shut.

On the stone steps leading out of the mansion and onto the street, they are alone. 

“Was that a bit much?” he asks.

Vanya grabs him by the collar, yanking him down to plant a heavy kiss onto his mouth. He can taste the alcohol on it, and it knocks the breath from him.

He starts kissing back, and she lets his tongue into her mouth. 

Five feels an uncanny emotion wash over him, like someone’s dropped a bucket of ice water on him at the exact moment the alcohol began blooming warmly inside his chest. 

They break apart, panting, and his forehead nuzzles hers gently.

Away rush his worries, borne away by a wave of warm, soft affection, and in the space they’ve left dawns a realization: Five doesn’t mind at all, if he’s going to be stuck here forever. 

_It won’t be bad,_ he thinks. _It won’t be bad at all._


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> FYI, smut's in this chapter.

They don’t see each other for a few days, after that night.

Five sees her back to her apartment, kisses her again in the doorway, and leaves Vanya with stars in her eyes.

They talk on the phone for a few hours, but he’s careful to put off on seeing her, to mention that he has plans for the next few days, but would like to drop by sometime later.

It’s important to unfold this carefully. Allison had been correct in that regard, that they’re moving fast, and that they do need to think twice about it. Not that he’ll ever tell her, of course.

So, he waits two days before seeing her again, giving them both a moment to breathe.

In that time, Five continues the important work of destroying his predecessor’s business. He’s simply not cut out for it, and the sooner he can stripmine the shop and sell it for parts, the safer he’ll be. 

Five’s aware, vaguely, that he’s going to have to get a job at some point. 

When he tries to picture it, to picture _him,_ Five Hargreeves, informally retired assassin, former survivor, former child soldier, sitting in a cubicle staring at a spreadsheet, counting down the days until his next vacation, he bursts into laughter.

He’ll wait a little longer, before he does it. The Peabody house was inherited, so there’s nothing to pay off, and his bank account is solid enough; Leonard’s shop was modest, but successful, and he’d had inheritances from both his father and grandmother to further bolster him. Add to that the money he’ll make from selling all of Imperial Woodwares’ assets, and probably the vacation cabin--

Oh. Right. The cabin.

Five had gone there too, in that two-day span of separation. He’d gone there, taken in the beautiful stillness of the lake, the green of the trees, and spent a solid hour staring at the floor in the living room, where he and his brothers had found Allison gagging on her own blood. 

He sits there, tracing the unblemished carpet with his fingertips, thinking about what must have happened to lead to this, about how much happened in the past week that he simply does not know. About Allison, charging off alone into the night to drag her sister home, about Vanya lashing out in a rage. Allison had only told them it was an accident hours after she’d woken up, which tells him that she hadn’t exactly been certain about it at first.

There’s a certain appeal to the thought of driving out here with Vanya to spend a weekend sitting out at the edge of the dock, dipping their feet in the cold murky water, or walking on the forest trails. She’d love it out here. She could play her music for him, and they could sit out on the porch and listen to the insects while the sun sets, and there’d be no one around to see them. Also, the little wooden duck on the mantle is admittedly quite charming.

But he’s not taking any chances. There’s always the chance that Allison might pursue them, that something might transpire to lead them to the same place they’d been this time last week.

So. He’s selling it. As fast as he can.

He’s got a few area realtors in mind, and is trying to determine which one would be the least involved and most eager to get it over with, but it’ll take time to finalize things, and he has a day until his apocalyptic deadline.

And he really, really needs to see her.

So, the night before her concert, Five drops by with takeout from Wok ‘N’ Roll, and an announcement that he’s purchased a ticket to her show, and will be in the front row. 

They eat, and she plays for him, and he feels like he’s thirteen again. Then, they settle in onto her couch to sit and read.

Five is scanning the paper for any announcements: missing persons, obituaries, the like, when he comes across an advertisement for the performance tomorrow, with First Chair Helen’s face emblazoned, big and prominent and smeared with newsprint.

Then, he realizes, no, Helen Cho hasn’t been killed in this timeline. She’ll continue to be her bitchy self, and there will be no openings for first chair in the St. Pluvium Orchestra.

 _Shame,_ he thinks. About the latter, of course. Definitely not the former.

“What’s the deal with first chair?” he asks, and Vanya perks up beside him, leaning over to peer at the newspaper. 

“Oh.” Vanya smooths her hair behind her ears. “It’s just that… well, you get paid more, so that’s really nice, I could use the money.”

Five raises an eyebrow. Clearly, there’s more to it.

Vanya obliges: “And you get a lot more say in what the orchestra plays. And you get this really nice solo. And everyone _listens_ to you, and there’s this _spotlight_ that shines on you, and...”

She trails off, eyes going misty as she takes the paper gently from his hands, staring at the advertisement, no doubt envisioning herself in his place. “It’d be nice, you know?”

And Five gets it. 

He’s wondered for days about how someone as averse to violence as Vanya would simply turn loose and destroy the world, and now he thinks that final missing puzzle piece has slid into place, and the whole picture’s suddenly before him, clear as day.

He’d been so obsessed with determining _that_ she’d done it, that he’d never stopped to consider _why_ she would.

And that’s the thing. She never wanted to, did she? She never went to the theatre with the intention of destroying the world. The only thing she wanted while she was playing on that stage was to be seen and heard, in a way she’s been denied all her life. And they took that from her. 

The knot in his gut unfurls. All any of them had ever had to do to save the world was leave her be. He’d wanted an apocalypse so badly that he’d gone and made it, rolling that wheel into motion with his own hands.

He’s a fucking idiot.

Beside him, Vanya rattles out her evening pill, and he listens to her swallow it, cringing. She’s still on her medication in this timeline; knowing what he now knows about her powers, it’s clear to him what Leonard must have done to stir them.

Keeping Vanya on the medication makes his stomach coil in visceral disgust, but it’s a necessary evil for now. When the clock runs out and the world is safe, then he’ll start to slowly wean her off of it, from twice-daily-plus-take-as-needed to twice-daily-only, to once-daily, to one every few days, to none at all. Messing with meds is dangerous, and even though she shouldn’t even be on them, they’ve become so integral to her internal systems that removing them all at once will be too great a shock. No wonder she’d been so out of it.

Five plucks up Vanya’s copy of _The Sundial_ from the side table, and starts paging through it curiously. It’s one of the many books she’s lending him, the depressing ones with eerie houses and evil patriarchs and terrified young heroines who descend into madness. She’s composed a list for him, and he’ll start on it in the coming days. 

“You’ll like it,” Vanya says firmly. 

“And how do you know that?”

“It’s heady and psychological and twisted.”

“And you think I like heady, psychological, twisted books?”

Vanya gives him a look. She’s right, he does. Probably because he himself is a heady, psychological, twisted person. 

“You know something?” Five says. 

This is something he’s mulled over in their time apart: Vanya needs something to look _forward_ to. Something that’s hers, something she can make herself. This might be it.

“What?”

“You should write your own.”

“Really?”

“Really. You’ve got a lot of opinions on these, and you’re smart, and you’ve got an interesting perspective, you know, I’d be really interested to read something else you’ve written.”

All true.

“Plus,” Five adds, “You’ve already written a book so you know how it’s done.”

“Oh, well, that was different.” Vanya worries her lip between her teeth. “That was personal.”

“Well, this would be impersonal. You could even use a pen name.”

Vanya stays quiet. She’s staring at the same exact spot in the newspaper, so he can tell she’s using it more as a shield, an excuse to avoid eye contact.

He softens his voice, leaning over, to rest a hand on her knee. “Consider it?”

She looks up at him. “Okay.”

There’s a moment of warm, companionate silence between them, where he traces a reassuring pattern into her knee with his hand, and she rests her hand over his. 

Vanya keeps glancing up at him, her gaze flitting nervously.

She’s thinking about something, and whatever it is, given how her fingers are starting to twitch, and her brow is knitting together, it’s worrying her deeply.

“What is it?” he asks, and she flinches.

Vanya chews on the words for a moment, but then she sighs. 

“I’ve been holding out on you.”

“You’re not cheating on me with the neighbor, are you?” Five snarks playfully, tugging her fingers. “I knew you had a thing for older women, but I have to admit, _Mrs. Kowalski?”_

Vanya doesn’t laugh. She doesn’t smile.

Five frowns, and leans in. 

“You remind me of someone,” she says, drawing the words out carefully and quietly, like saying them requires a great deal of effort. “Someone I lost.”

“Oh?” 

“It just… doesn’t feel fair? Not telling you.”

It’s that imperceptible instinct they share, the two of them who have known each other for so very long, who have known each other so very deeply, that gives him a pretty good guess as to who she’s talking about.

(Him. She’s talking about him.)

Five rolls the next words over in his head, knowing he’s pushing up against a boundary, unable to stop himself: “Did you love him?”

Vanya’s quiet for a moment.

There’s something gathering in the pit of his stomach, hot and cold and fear and excitement mottling together. 

Finally, she speaks. “No.”

And everything in Five freezes over.

“But…” Vanya continues, furrowing her brow, “I think I _could_ have? If maybe things hadn’t ended, if he hadn’t gone when he did, I… I think we could’ve gotten there. Does that make sense?”

“Yes,” he answers honestly. It makes more sense than anything in the world. He wants to spring up, grab her around the waist and kiss her deeply and whisper into her ear, _I’m here, I’m here,_ but he can’t.

Instead, he says this: “What was his name?”

Vanya looks away.

“I can’t tell you.” Her voice is so quiet, she’s practically whispering, and there’s a quiver to it that makes him certain that she’s holding back tears.

“Why?”

“You might hate me.”

“I could _never_ hate you,” he says, and it’s true.

“You barely know me.”

Which, point.

“Trust me.” He leans in, is now close enough that he could just dip his head down and rest his forehead on hers. _“Trust me.”_

Vanya looks up at him mournfully, and her hands reach up to cup his face in her hands. 

She kisses him, soft and insistent and open-mouthed, and his hands slide down to slip his fingers through the loops in her jeans. 

He tugs her quickly, pulling her flush against him, and reclines on the couch, letting her fall back with him with a _thump_ that sends a few pillows pattering to the floor.

Vanya’s curled atop him and caught between his thighs, her fingers running through his hair, trailing down to grip his shoulders. Her weight atop him is lovely, and he can feel her warmth seeping through his clothes, through his skin, deep into his bones. They haven’t been drinking, but there’s a cloud of heady bliss descending over his mind, that makes it hard for him to think at all, that makes it so, so easy to ignore that thick muck of guilt gathering.

Her mouth slides off of his, and she keeps kissing him, wet and urgent, moving her way down his jaw and onto his neck.

Vanya’s fingers are tugging at his belt.

Fuck, oh _fuck._

Five’s breath catches in his chest, and he stares, wild-eyed, as Vanya slides slowly down his body, tugging down his fly and reaching into his boxers.

His body is suddenly very, very aware of where she’s reaching, and Five stays utterly still, his mouth hanging open.

What he’s letting her do is probably deeply, deeply immoral, a little voice in the back of his head says, but he can hardly hear it at all, like he’s a mile underwater, listening to it chatter from someplace above the waves.

It’s so, _so_ easy to ignore, when Vanya has his cock in her hand, when she’s taking it into her mouth and starting to bob her head.

Five’s fingers dig into the seat, and a wounded noise grinds its way out of his throat, when her eyes roll up to meet his gaze.

He starts bucking his hips up into her mouth, using all of the restraint he has left to avoid fucking too hard; Vanya is eager and sweet, but incredibly sloppy, slobbering everywhere. She’s clearly not done this much, if at all, and he doesn’t want to overwhelm her.

 _Terrible,_ he thinks, _I'm a terrible man._

He winds his fingers through her hair, and she tilts her head into his palm, humming. For a second, the world flashes white.

He has to stop her. It’ll be over too quickly.

So, he tugs on her hair, hissing through gritted teeth, _“Wait.”_

Vanya stops immediately, coughing shallowly and popping off of his cock, spit smeared across her chin. She looks up at him, squeezing his hips gently. “What is it? Was that okay?”

“Oh, _yeah._ Yeah, that was great, I just… _Here.”_ Five presses gently on the back of her head to guide her to him, pushing off his elbow to rise up to meet her halfway.

He surges forward, pressing his open mouth to hers, tasting himself on her tongue, not caring at all about the mess.

Vanya makes a soft, sweet noise, and she crawls up to wrap her limbs around him, to dig her nails into his shoulders.

Five slides his hands down between them, reaching for her pants, and tugging at the belt. “Take these off,” he says, quickly, breathlessly, flicking the button at the front of her jeans undone. 

“Okay,” Vanya gasps, and he can see the corners of her lips quirking up, hear the excited catch in her voice, feel her heart hammering away against his. 

_It’s okay,_ he tells himself. _It’s okay that I’m doing this. She wants this too. I can make it good._

Her fingers join his, and navigate the task of rolling down her pants far quicker than he could, so he sets to tugging at the buttons of his own shirt. 

They pull apart a moment, so Vanya can kick her jeans down to the floor, and to raise her arms, so he can pull her shirt up and over her head. 

Vanya’s hands find him, pushing his shirt down off his shoulders, and her legs loop around his waist. He leans in, to kiss her again, and she lets him. 

They’ve reversed positions now, Vanya flat on her back, with Five’s torso bracketed by her soft thighs, and he slides his hands around her chest, to unfasten her bra. She lets him lift it off of her, and he’s breathless again, at the sight of her. 

Five drops his head, to get his mouth on her breasts, to suck bruises into her skin, to drag his teeth against her nipples, and he feels her squirming with want beneath him. He smiles into her skin.

Five’s hand slides down her soft belly, down to her cunt, and he can feel how wet she is through her worn underwear. The sensation makes him sigh hungrily, and he gives her breast a few quick, sharp kisses, before moving again, getting his fingers into the waistband of her underwear. Vanya lifts, and helps him peel the last of her clothing off.

Then, she pulls on him, until he slots his hips up against hers, until his cock’s grinding against her cunt, until he’s pushing in, until his weight is pressing down on her, with her chin folded neatly over his shoulder. 

As Five grinds into her, hard and fast and uneven, he can feel her hand shifting, moving up to clap over her mouth. She’s struggling not to curse, and he finds it sweet that she’s trying to keep quiet, almost wants to urge her to stop, to be loud for him. 

She’s close now; he can feel her coiling, starting to shiver, and _there,_ he can feel her clenching tightly around him, as she whispers, “F...Fi…” 

Five barely registers it, too lost in the last, desperate thrusts before his own release. He’s so close now too, and his world has fallen away to a single, base impulse.

He ruts into her wildly, before spilling into her with a shudder, his face buried in her neck, beside himself with pleasure.

Five pulls up, to draw his weight off of her so he might stare down at the space where their bodies meet, to see the mess he’s made, and he feels a visceral, pang of satisfaction at the sight of her pussy, pink and leaking.

Five’s gaze trails up her body, up her soft belly, past her well-kissed breasts, up her smooth neck, to her face, and--

She looks distressed. She’s staring down past him, eyes wide, face drained of all blood and mouth ajar. Her lower lip is wobbling, and her eyes are brimming with tears.

Five glances down quickly and--

Oh.

Oh no.

He’s an idiot. He’d been so caught up in getting to have Vanya that he’d forgotten his act, forgotten why he always wears long sleeves around her. 

In his haste, he’d forgotten his tattoo.

It’s out. It’s _out,_ with the light from Vanya’s lamp hitting it, and she’s looking at it and…

She knows.

Five opens his mouth, tries to say something, to say anything at all, but nothing comes out. 

Her eyes flick quickly down to where he’s just pulled out of her, and a tiny, soft sob sounds in the back of her throat.

She's mouthing a question: _Five?_

He only stares at her, feeling that terrible gnawing guilt roil back up from deep within him, set its teeth to his gut and start tearing into him.

He’s terrible. He’s _terrible._ He's ruined everything.

 _"Vanya,”_ he says weakly, at a loss for any other words. 

It's enough.

Vanya’s eyes meet his for just a moment, and he knows for certain that she doesn’t need her powers at all, to reach out and stop his heart cold.

She crawls out from under him, and he stays rooted in place, kneeling on her couch, watching, feeling his chest cleave in two as she stumbles to the floor, grabbing her clothes in a tangled ball, and scurries out of the room, down the hall to her bedroom.

The door slams, louder than a gunshot.


	6. Chapter 6

Here’s the thing: Vanya’s been holding out on Leonard, since the moment she’d knocked into him. 

She’s been holding out on everyone, really.

At least, everyone she’s ever dated.

Not that there were many of them, of course. Vanya can count all the relationships she’s been in on one hand, including the one she’s in now, and none of them have lasted more than a scant month. 

But still. It’s the principle of the thing: when you are together with someone, you are with them because of _them,_ and the fact is that Vanya’s never chosen a single one of her lovers for who they _were,_ but for who they _reminded her of._

Back when she’d seen her therapist, they’d talked a lot about her family, and a bit about her relationships, or her lack thereof. About her inability to form connections with other adults, her tendency to avoid unnecessary interactions whenever possible, her anxieties about her inconsistent libido, which ebbs and flows so unpredictably that she’s never been sure about her own sexuality, whether she even has one, whether it’d fallen off the shelf and shattered at some point during her adolescence, some awful side effect of puberty.

They talked about her lovers. 

About how she could never make them stay. How her first boyfriend, the one she’d had when she’d first entered college, had abandoned her the morning after they’d first had sex. How her latest girlfriend, the one that came after she’d published The Book, had waited two tepid dates before pushing to meet her family, and never spoke of anything again, until Vanya had frankly told her that she was on awful terms with them, and she’d suddenly found all her calls unanswered for weeks. 

About how she’d always throw herself into her relationships, insisting to see them every day, calling every night and insisting they go everywhere together. Her therapist had said it had something to do with an abandonment complex, with clinging to someone so tightly that it inevitably put them off, about how boundaries are good and useful. Or something. Vanya can’t remember clearly; she’d tend to zone out near the end of their meetings, staring at the ceiling fan and counting the blades over and over counterclockwise until it was time to leave.

About how she can’t make it a week in without pushing for sex, despite her mercurial libido. Again, her therapist had a solution: Vanya wanted the intimacy, the touch, the weight of another body pressing down on hers, the warmth of skin pressing against skin and the knowledge that while she is beneath them, above them, around them, she has their absolute attention. That for once, no one would look away from her.

They talked about how all her boyfriends and girlfriends looked the same. How they were all tall and pale, with short, dark hair and pale eyes. How Vanya had a _type._

It wasn’t long after that meeting that Vanya’d decided to quietly cancel her meetings, and opted to medicate herself a bit more whenever she’d feel down. It’s an abyss she didn’t want to look into at the time.

But in the past week, with Leonard, she’d been staring down a lot, into that darkness, seeing the monster she’d left to roam there. She’d been thinking about how cruel it was, to be using him in the way she is, to be clinging to his arm and demanding all his attention, consuming his time like a vampire. 

Because _honestly._ Here’s a kind, beautiful man who listens to her in a way no one has in years. Here’s a sharp, witty man who swept into her life out of nowhere, and turned up his nose at her family and snarled at Helen, who knows who she is and honestly prefers her to everyone else, despite her ordinariness.

Here he is, and anyone would be lucky to have him.

And this entire time, she’s been looking at all those wonderful things about him, and thinking about _Five,_ about how she loves him best of any of the partners she’s had so far because he is the most similar to her brother.

It’s something she’d admitted to herself long ago, that she might have loved him. Or rather, that she might have been _able_ to love him, if the chips had fallen differently, and he had been persuaded to stay.

She thinks about it a lot. Watching the glossy back of his head as he stormed out of the dining hall, and out of her life forever. Those countless nights she’d spent sitting vigil, until Dad had gotten annoyed enough to ship her off to boarding school, for fear that she’d set a bad example and prove a distraction to the others.

She’s still waiting, in a lot of ways.

She’d stopped leaving the lights on, stopped leaving out special sandwiches, but that doesn’t mean she stopped hoping he’d step through the door to her bedroom, or her dormitory, or her apartment one day, as confident and prideful as when he’d left.

She’s still looking, in the faces that pass her by when she walks to work, in the men and women she falls for.

Those strange, shapeless feelings she’d begun developing for him in adolescence hadn’t died off or dried up and blown away, but they’d rooted deep in some unmoving, steady place inside her, and they keep forcing their way up, searching for some source of light, that might allow them to grow.

Each and every one of her boyfriends and girlfriends had been used for this purpose. Vanya had chosen them for their Five-ness, had quietly adored them for how closely they mimicked her long-lost love, had secretly hated them when they dared to be themselves. 

But she’s felt strangely vulnerable this week. Maybe it was the funeral that did it; her return to the house, to find it colder than she’d left it, to find the portrait gathering dust on the mantle and his bedroom still perfectly untouched. Maybe that had torn the old wound open.

It doesn’t really matter; the thing is, she’d been so _cruel,_ stringing Leonard along like this. The guilt of it all has been weighing her down, like an invisible boulder, bound to her stooped, fragile shoulders. 

Here is a man who might be able to love her, and she is comparing every wonderful thing about him to the boy who’d gone off and abandoned her.

That’s what Vanya had been thinking, when he’d asked her about writing again. It’d been the exact thing Five would say, the exact way he’d lure her out of her shell and guide her gently out into the world, and she’d wondered at how Leonard had been able to do it, to slip between all the layers of crumbling exoskeleton she’d built up over the years and draw out a desire she hadn’t even admitted to herself she’d had. 

Well, now she has her answer.

Vanya is sitting on the edge of her bed, the drafty air of her apartment raising gooseflesh. Her clothes are in a knotted ball by her side, and she is staring down at her bare thighs, at the streaks of cum on them.

The universe, it seems, has opted to deliver her everything she’d ever wanted, in the worst way possible. 

Somehow, Five had returned. He had returned in a form she’d only ever dreamed about, one as old as her, the shape of a grown man that’d eluded her in dreams for years. 

He had returned, and he had found her, and he had pretended to be someone else, all to have her. 

Five’s plans had always been wanting for logic; this is why she strategized so well with him, keeping two feet squarely on the ground, so she might anchor him before he flies up and away into the sun. 

But she honestly has no idea why on earth he’d pretend to be another man, when all he’d ever had to do to have her was to roll up his sleeve and tell her his true name, and she’d have given herself over to him immediately.

Vanya, who’s already cried herself utterly empty, suddenly finds herself laughing, as she reaches over for her shirt, smears her face dry of tears, and then sets to work on wiping her thighs clean. 

Seventeen years later, and Five is still _stupid_ as ever. 

A flicker of movement, at the edge of her vision: There are two shadowy blots breaking up the bar of light that seeps in through the bottom of her door.

He’s out there. 

_Five’s_ out there.

He’s out there, standing at her doorway, staring. 

She can imagine him, reaching for the knob, hand trembling. 

_Do it,_ she thinks _. Come in and talk to me. Come in and explain how on earth you came back, and why on earth you chose to do this, of all things._

As if summoned by her thoughts, he enters.

Not through the door, but through a tear in the space of her room, appearing in an electric, blue-white flash of ozone, making all the hairs on the back of her neck rise to attention.

So. It’s him. Without a shadow of a doubt. Not that she had one. 

He’s dressed. Sloppily. 

His sleeve's still rolled up; she can still see the greenish-black blot of their father's brand on him. 

Five’s eyes flit down to her naked body, and she sees him swallow.

Strangely, she doesn’t feel ashamed in the slightest.

 _Good,_ she thinks. Better to have his full attention, to keep him on edge. 

“How long have you been back?” she says, a little surprised at the coldness in her voice.

“Little over a week.” Vanya knows Five, or at least, she _thought_ she knew him, and he’s missing any of the old tells, so she decides to take his word for it. Not that it’s worth much, given what she’s just discovered.

Something settles in her at the admission, a silent breath being released at the thought that he hadn’t returned and simply set up a life without her, that he’d come for her quickly enough.

Still.

“What’s with the name?”

Five sighs, long and slow. 

“It’s… A long story.”

“Try me.”

“No, Vanya, you don’t understand--”

“Really? You’re going with that?”

“No, I…” Five runs his hand through his hair. 

“You should have told me. You know, all you had to do was _tell me,_ and I’d have still done it all. There was no reason to lie.”

The corner of Five’s red mouth quirks at this. He’s a little amused, and she frowns. 

“It wasn’t you I was worried about.”

Vanya frowns. “Dad’s dead now. You said you were back a week, right? Well, you had days to tell me, and you must’ve known that he was gone.”

“Not Dad. Someone else.”

“Who?”

“They’re… Listen.” Five steps forward, and strangely, drops to his knees on the floor before her, reaching for her hand.

She allows him to take it. 

“I’m not supposed to be here.” His voice is low and intense. “I had to take this name, and this identity, so I could stay here, so no one would come for me, so no one would stop me from coming back.”

Vanya blinks. 

“What are you talking about?”

Five sighs, staring uneasily off into the middle distance. 

“This isn’t the first time I’ve lived through this week.”

“What, so you’re in a time loop?”

“No, more like… like I knocked into an alternate universe of some sort. I don’t think things are going to happen the same way.”

Vanya processes the information slowly. Something must have gone horribly wrong, then, to send him skidding back through time.

“A lot happens, then.”

Five stares at her, drawing in a long breath.

“More than you can imagine. Too much to say in one sitting. Believe me, Vanya, I want to tell you more than anything in the world, and I _will_ tell you.” 

“Just not now.”

“Just not now. But soon. I want you to be focused for your concert, and I want to be there to watch you play.”

Vanya thinks it over for a moment.

“Fine,” she decides, registering a spark in Five’s eye, “But after the concert, you tell me. No more secrets. We tell each other everything from now on.”

Five nods, squeezing her hand. 

“No more secrets,” he agrees.

Vanya reaches out, gently lets her fingers play through his hair, and she watches him rest his head on her thighs, leaning into her touch, like a housecat, hungry for her. The last time she’d had her hands in his hair, they were thirteen and the world was so much simpler. Somehow, this gesture between the two of them has survived all this time.

In fact, so many of them have.

 _There’s hope,_ she’s pretty sure. _Hope that we might..._

“So,” she says, “You and I…”

Five looks up to her. 

“Was this all a ploy?”

She knows the answer. She just has to hear him say it.

And he does: “No. _No,_ I… This is something I’ve wanted for a very, very long time. I just… God, this was a fucked-up way to go about it.”

Vanya snorts, despite herself. 

“So… we can keep this up, then?” she asks quietly. “You and I?”

“Would you like to?”

“Yes.” She’s never wanted anything more. “But we make our choices together. And you can’t leave me again. Ever. Can you promise me that? Honestly?”

“Yes. I can.”

She believes him.

Five’s arms are folding gently around her abdomen, and she lets him, trailing gentle circles with her fingers through his hair. 

“Do you forgive me?” he asks.

Vanya considers it for a moment.

She's already made the choice to do so, has already drawn her forgiveness up and folded it tight, but she has yet to hand it over. 

“I can’t.”

Five looks up at her.

“Not yet, anyway. Not until you tell me everything.”

There's just too much she doesn't know, too much he has to tell her. And Vanya is very good at waiting, so she'll give it another day, and trust that this delay is for a good reason. But none more after that.

Five nods solemnly, and Vanya gently catches his chin in her hand, lifting it up so she can look into his face. She doesn't love him yet, but she will soon.

Vanya gives him a little smile, cocking her head. “I know a few things you could do, though, to start making it up.”

She's joking, just a little, but Five picks up what she's implying.

Five begins nuzzling gently at her knees, wrapping his hands around them. “I’d better get to work then,” he says. 

Vanya parts her knees, leaning back onto her mattress, her lips curling upwards in giddy anticipation as his lips start trailing up her thighs. Her fingers stay threaded tightly through his, and she can feel the heat of Five’s breath huffing on her cunt when--

“Oh _God,”_ Vanya says, sitting up sharply, staring down at him. “I forgot.”

Five peers up from between her thighs. “What?”

“What the hell do we tell the _rest_ of them? I mean, we have to tell them who you are, right?”

“You know, I would appreciate you not bringing up our family while I'm going down on you.”

Vanya rolls her eyes, and presses him gently back down.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading!
> 
> (+'oh sister' by andrew bird)


End file.
